personalism a version of personal idealism that flourished in the United States (principally at Boston University) from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Its principal proponents were Borden Parker Bowne (1847– 1910) and three of his students: Albert Knudson (1873–1953); Ralph Flewelling (1871–1960), who founded The Personalist; and, most importantly, Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953). Their personalism was both idealistic and theistic and was influential in philosophy and in theology. Personalism traced its philosophical lineage to Berkeley and Leibniz, and had as its foundational insight the view that all reality is ultimately personal. God is the transcendent person and the ground or creator of all other persons; nature is a system of objects either for or in the minds of persons. Both Bowne and Brightman considered themselves empiricists in the tradition of Berkeley. Immediate experience is the starting point, but this experience involves a fundamental knowledge of the self as a personal being with changing states. Given this pluralism, the coherence, order, and intelligibility of the universe are seen to derive from God, the uncreated person. Bowne’s God is the eternal and omnipotent being of classical theism, but Brightman argued that if God is a real person he must be construed as both temporal and finite. Given the fact of evil, God is seen as gradually gaining control over his created world, with regard to which his will is intrinsically limited. Another version of personalism developed in France out of the neo-Scholastic tradition. E. Mounier (1905–50), Maritain, and Gilson identified themselves as personalists, inasmuch as they viewed the infinite person (God) and finite persons as the source and locus of intrinsic value. They did not, however, view the natural order as intrinsically personal. See also IDEALISM, NEO-THOMIS. C.F.D.